I'm the Founder and Managing Partner of Ironfire Capital LLC, which runs a tech-focused hedge fund and angel fund. I did a Ph.D. in Management at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business in New York, with a specialization in Strategic Management. You can follow me on Twitter @ericjackson, subscribe to me on Facebook, follow me on Sina Weibo, or Circle me on Google+. My email is: dr.eric.jackson@me.com

Interview With Eric Winter, Head Of Rivals.com

Rivals.com is an old YahooYahoo! acquisition, dating back to 2007. Unlike more recent acquisitions, Yahoo! didn’t shut them down but rather let them continue to operate independently. It’s been a fantastic hands-off approach, as Rivals is the number one sports site covering the top high school athletes and their decisions declaring where to play college sports. I caught up with Eric Winter, head of Rivals.com, recently to discuss the site’s approach and its future.

Eric, you took over Rivals.com right after the acquisition in 2007. Can you tell us where you’ve taken Rivals since then?

Image by None via CrunchBase

A short while after Rivals Founder & CEO Shannon Terry left Yahoo, I was asked to take over a business that had been #1 in its space. I got a chance to watch how Shannon and his team managed essentially a start-up in a corporate environment, and I really focused on continuing that approach.

So I took over a staff of roughly 330 writers, editors, videographers, and football & basketball analysts for 160 websites, whose technical product hadn’t been upgraded in nearly a decade. With more media companies entering the recruiting space at the time (and even today), competition was fierce. Rivals.com now has its largest technical team in years working feverishly behind the scenes to enhance our recruit prospect pages, player and team rankings tools, and the heart & soul of our business – the message board community (there are more than 400 throughout the Rivals.com network).

Why did Yahoo want to own this property?

Rivals.com covers the art and science of college football and basketball recruiting, and high school and college athletics in general. And we have the best, most engaged users in sports. The Rivals.com network has over 400 premium & free message boards where fans at the local, state, regional and national level could congregate and discuss everything there is about their favorite schools. It’s an amazing community of passionate high school and college sports fans than what there is within the Rivals.com network.

Rivals has gone from “just a website” to now running these very large player combines or camps. Can you tell us how important those events are to Rivals?

The Rivals Camp Series Presented By Under ArmourUnder Armour is the premier football camp for the nation’s elite high school football players. More than 4,000 student-athletes will participate in our 18 camps in 2014. Rivals.com has four core and distinct audiences, and the Rivals Camp Seriesserves each one: 1) Athletes: they can compete against “like” players in drills which are led by former NFL players & coaches, and former college players and coaches; 2) Parents/Guardians: It is crucial for family members to have these young men participate in a safe environment that is managed by two trusted brands (Rivals and Yahoo Sports); 3) Coaching Community: High School and college coaches alike know that these student-athletes will face the best competition and receive very strong skill development; 4) Rivals.com Subscribers & Users: There is an expectation from our millions of registered users and subscribers that Rivals.com goes deep & narrow with its coverage throughout the recruitment process for thousands of student-athletes. Having exclusive access to thousands of the nation’s top players provides our millions of loyal users and subscribers an opportunity to discover the best up and coming athletes.

What does a Rivals camp offer compared to IMG or another competitor?

The Rivals Camp Series Presented By Under Armour was created to allow the most elite student-athletes across the country to compete against similar athletes at each camp. That means a 5-star Defensive End who is committed to Alabama will go 1-on-1 against a 5-star Offensive Tackle who is committed to Auburn. A 5-Star Wide Receiver who is committed to USC will go 1-on-1 against a 5-star Defensive Back who is committed to cross-town rival, UCLA. Young men want to participate against the best in the city, state, region and nation, and they want to get noticed when they perform well. Rivals produces approximately a thousand video clips from each camp, 2K images from each camp, and scores of written articles and ranking (lists) from each camp. My team’s job essentially begins the minute the players leave our camp – because we now produce content for our 160 websites across the country. That means Rivals secures exclusive access to thousands of top student-athletes and we produce a staggering amount of content for our desktop & mobile audiences.

There’s been some high level media discussion recently on boosters and others trying to zero in on players at these types of camps. What does Rivals do to prevent this from happening?

I’m really proud of the way we manage our camps – they are as professionally run as a college or pro football game with respect to attendees. Our No. 1 goal is to protect the student-athletes when they arrive at a Rivals Camp Series event. Only credentialed media and Rivals staff can be on the field and have access to athletes. Parents, high school coaches and other camp visitors must sit in the stands or behind ropes. College coaches and their recruiting coordinators, obviously, do not attend our camps, and we are very mindful of the communication between those in the stands and players during our events. My leadership team delivers an impassioned speech at the end of each camp encouraging kids to respect the recruiting process while protecting themselves and their eligibility along the way – especially since some of these kids will become full-blown stars coming out of our camps based on their performance.

When a bigger company like Yahoo buys a smaller company like Rivals, sometimes the smaller company gets swallowed up by the bigger one and sometimes it’s left to run independently. What’s been the approach with Rivals in the last six years?

Those decisions are made at the executive level, of course, and are based on the needs of the company at that particular time. Rivals.com has the best of three worlds: Back in 2007 Yahoo chose, and continues, to allow Rivals to run as a stand-alone property. But Rivals and the staggering amount of content we create gets integrated throughout the fabric of Yahoo in general and Yahoo Sports in particular. And with Yahoo Sports’ strategic alliance with the NBC Sports Group, Rivals.com now has a television broadcast platform as we showcase our talent on-air to millions of households.

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